Seth Gordon Quotes

The television industry doesn't like to see the compexity of the world. It prefers simple reporting, with simple ideas: this is white, that's black; this is good, that's bad.

Here's one thing the media and all of us should learn: Trump is not wrong nearly as much as everybody says he's wrong.

Most of the things I read from journalists are, you know, a little bit simplified and easy.

I think people have an idea of what Fox News is. If people don't watch Fox News, then it's just a caricature, it's not real, they have it in their heads that it's something very different than what it actually is.

Writers and journalists tend to be simplistic about politics when, like all other areas of life, it's more complicated.

I think the media spends a lot of time fooling itself.

This trend of reporting process over substance is unfortunate, if omnipresent. Even worse is the media's inability - or unwillingness - to fact-check Republicans who are angry about the Democrats trying to debate and vote on Iraq policy.

Their coverage on the Fox News Channel has been atrocious. The stuff that comes out of Sean Hannity's mouth has been infuriating. The stuff that Bill O'Reilly says has been illogical. You go up and down the schedule and it's insanity over there. The number of lies, perpetuated, promoted by Fox News is just shameful and it hurts everybody.

Politicians need a film appreciation course.

I've been interested in watching the level of conservative misinformation that circulates through the media.

If you interviewed 1,000 politicians and asked about whether the media's too soft or too hard, about 999 would say too hard.

The media are a bunch of maggots…. I don't smoke crack cocaine!

We've all seen 'Network' and 'Wag the Dog,' but we were somehow insulated by the fact that those were just movies, fictions, and we could rest easy that the Real News doesn't operate that way. Well, it does - sometimes.

I'm not sure I buy the argument that the public is more mistrustful - the debate will always garner that kind of traction because anything the BBC does is always in the spotlight.

I'm not insulting Trump supporters; I'm calling the people that CNN puts on television terrible representatives of the views of conservatives.

The American media is delivering nothing but fakeness.

How frustrating would it be if you're the president of the United States, and every single time you turn on the TV on most of the channels, they're misconstruing what you say?

The next time a news outlet complains about the state of our political rhetoric or the uninformed U.S. voter, we should promptly point them to the video of Ashley Parker raucous in a Polish cemetery or Philip Rucker's diatribes on party invitations.

So much of what we get on our news debate shows is really people spinning one way or the other, giving their talking points one way or the other.

If there is one way that I would sum up what the 2016 election was on cable news, it was world-class journalists interviewing morons.

Don't ever believe what you see in films.

I wish the media stopped making two and two equal five all the time.

It is sad that some people in the media like to create stories to sell their media, without any real facts to back up their stories.

The media no longer ask those who know something to share that knowledge with the public. Instead they ask those who know nothing to represent the ignorance of the public and, in so doing, to legitimate it.

Among all the complaints you hear these days about the crimes of the media, it seems to me the critics miss the big one. It is that especially TV, but also we of the print press, tend to reduce mess and complexity and ambiguity to a simple story line that doesn't reflect reality so much as it distorts it. ... What bothers me about the journalistic tendency to reduce unmanageable reality to self-contained, movielike little dramas is not just that we falsify when we do this. It is also that we really miss the good story.